President Trump to sign executive order creating VA accountability office

President Trump holds up the Veterans Choice Program And Improvement Act with VA Secretary David Shulkin clapping behind him, center, at the White House on April 19, 2017.(Photo: Chip Somodevilla, Getty Images)

WASHINGTON – President Trump, seeking to rack up accomplishments as he approaches the 100-day mark in office, will sign an executive order Thursday to create an office at the Department of Veterans Affairs charged with holding more VA employees accountable for wrongdoing.

The office will investigate allegations of misconduct – including retaliation against whistle-blowing employees who reported abuses — and seek to identify systemic barriers that have previously hindered the agencies’ top leaders from more adequately addressing such problems in the past, including withdisciplinary action.

VA Secretary David Shulkin told reporters the new office will report directly to him.

“Accountability is an important issue to us at VA and something that we’re focusing on to make sure that we have employees who work and are committed to the mission of serving our veterans, and when we find employees that have deviated from these values, we want to make sure that we can move them outside of VA and not have them working at VA,” he said, adding that Trump’s creation of the office by executive order demonstrates how committed the president is to the issue as well.

The VA already has an Office of Accountability Review that was created in 2014 to “ensure leadership accountability for improprieties related to patient scheduling and access to care, whistleblower retaliation, and related matters that impact public trust in VA.”

But Shulkin said that office reports to the agency’s general counsel and is focused on senior VA leaders. The new office will look at all VA employees.

Trump also promised during the campaign to create a White House hotline for VA complaints and a task force to investigate allegations of fraud and abuse at the VA, initiatives Shulkin has started to implement.

“These are all three efforts that are important for us to identify issues that are preventing us from doing the very best job that we can,” he said.

The VA has continued to face problems in veterans health care during the Trump administration, despite Trump’s pledges during the campaign he would fix the agency swiftly.

He found the hospital had run out of vascular patches to seal blood vessels and tubes for kidney dialysis, among other critical items, and 18 of 25 sterile storage areas were dirty. In addition, Missal said senior VA leaders had known about the problems for months and hadn’t addressed them.

Within hours of Missal’s report, Shulkin reassigned the medical center director and dispatched a top aide to take over. He said the situation was an “urgent patient-safety issue” and that the VA would conduct a “swift and comprehensive review” and take additional disciplinary actions if warranted.

“VA’s top priority is to ensure that no patient has been harmed,” he said at the time.

Shulkin said Wednesday that a new inventory system was in place within a few days, and now, “patient safety is not at all compromised."

The site, accesstocare.va.gov, also shows if veterans are satisfied with wait times at every hospital and clinic across the country and how long they are actually waiting on average.

“I really think that this is going to be, when we look back, this is going to be a turning point for VA because the leaders that aren’t focused on what they’re doing have no place now to hide and so they’re going to have to truly be accountable for their results,” Shulkin told USA TODAY at the time.

The VA, the second largest federal agency with more than 300,000 employees and some 1,500 hospitals and clinics across the nation, has been under near constant fire to provide better care and services to veterans since at least 2014, when news broke that veterans had died waiting for appointments at the Phoenix VA. Schedulers there had kept secret wait lists masking how long they were waiting.

The crisis prompted former President Barack Obama to install a new VA secretary, former Procter & Gamble CEO Bob McDonald, who tapped Shulkin to be undersecretary for health in 2015.